The Effects Of Explicit And Implicit Form-focused Instruction On Chinese Non-English-major Learners’ Acquisition Of The Speech Act Of Criticism

In recent years, more and more researchers in the field of interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) have attached importance to the studies on learners’development of pragmatic competence in foreign language classrooms. Previous studies have indicated that the pragmatic instruction in classroom contributes to improving learners’ pragmatic competence, and explicit instruction outperforms implicit instruction. However, both Jeon and Kaya (2006) and Wen (2010) believe that there still exists the argument on the relative effects of explicit and implicit learning in current academia owing to limited studies exploring implicit instruction and methodological issues such as unequal treatment lengths for explicit and implicit instruction and different methods adopted for data collection. Therefore, in order to understand the effects of the two types of pedagogical interventions, the researchers need to conduct further studies (Jeon&Kaya,2006; Ellis,2008).The previous L2pragmatics studies have focused predominantly on relatively easily defined speech acts such as requests, suggestions, refusal, apology and so on (e.g., Takimoto,2009; Li,2012). However, the research on the speech act of criticism abroad is scant (Nguyen et al.,2012), which has not been found in China.Therefore, based on Schmidt’s Noticing Hypothesis, Long’s Interaction Hypothesis. Swain’s Output Hypothesis, and Bialystok’s Two-dimensional Model, the present study attempts to answer the following two research questions:(1) Do both explicit and implicit form-focused instruction have short-term effects on the development of Chinese non-English-major learners’pragmatic competence in criticism? If so, which is more effective?(2) Do both explicit and implicit form-focused instruction have long-term effects on the development of Chinese non-English-major learners’pragmatic competence in criticism? If so, which is more effective? The study takes quantitative approach as its primary means while qualitative as complementary. The teaching experiment was made among Grade2012non-English-major fresh students of one university in Shandong Province, and the three classes which were taught by the researcher were randomly assigned to control group, explicit instruction group and implicit instruction group. In the six weeks of treatment, the participants in explicit group received direct consciousness-raising tasks and explicit meta-pragmatic explanation, and the instructor provided the explicit corrective feedback on participants’pragmatic and grammatical errors, whereas the participants in implicit group were provided with a combination of implicit techniques including typographical enhancement such as target forms in boldface and corrective feedback of recasts. In addition, after every two-week treatment, four participants in explicit and implicit groups were respectively randomly chosen to have an interview, aiming to understand their attitude towards explicit or implicit form-focused instruction and their achievement on pragmatics in the process of treatment. However, the participants in control group didn’t receive any treatment.The findings indicated that both explicit and implicit form-focused instruction have positive effects on the development of Chinese non-English major learners’English pragmatic competence in the speech act of criticism and the effects could last. However, explicit form-focused instruction is more effective than the implicit.